On the elevator to his hotel suite, Bill Browder has his nose pressed to his cellphone. “I’m checking for updates from Guatemala,” he tells me. Not for the latest coffee prices or vacation rentals, but for news of a Russian family imprisoned there “for violations of local residency laws—all because of pressure from the Putin regime.”
The Bitkov family is Mr. Browder’s latest moral campaign. An Anglo-American businessman with deep and harrowing ties to Russia, Mr. Browder is arguably the man Vladimir Putin would most like to see go up in a vengeful puff of smoke. Once the largest private investor in Russia, he has become—since his 2005 expulsion from the country and the 2009 death in prison of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky —Mr. Putin’s most vocal civilian opponent in the Western world.
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